Advances in technology help us get out the word and, in our own way, use multimedia to minister to you.
Our latest advancement is the Charisma Podcast Network, which has seen more than 880,000 podcast downloads in our first year. We’re finding that people enjoy receiving our podcasts on their smart phones and listening to them as they drive, or maybe as they exercise.
We have podcasts that make you laugh and others that inform you, but mostly we try to help you walk in the Spirit. Interestingly, Walking in the Spirit is our most popular podcast by Jennifer LeClaire, which consistently gets the most downloads.
Doing podcasts has been a learning experience for me. I even call my podcast the same name as my e-newsletter, The Strang Report. Often my Strang Reports are on the same topic—as they are today. They mainly are a potpourri of interesting people and places that I visit. I am encouraged by the number of people who are interested in getting to know the people I’m getting to know.
The CPN podcasts are the brainchild of Dr. Steve Greene, the executive vice president of our Media Group and publisher of Charisma. He is an extraordinary leader and has the ability to spot new areas of growth. Our media group is flourishing under his leadership.
It was a year ago this week that our first podcasts aired. In fact, I went back and listened to the first one in which Dr. Greene interviewed me about the Future Conference at Jim Garlow’s Skyline Church in San Diego. Since then, I mostly interview people on my podcast, and sometimes I will simply share something from my heart.
Dr. Greene and I went into the studio this week and did a podcast about our podcasts. You can listen to it here. We had fun joking about some of the things that have happened and tried to give some context to what podcasts are, what they’ve meant to our organization and what they mean to our listeners.
I want to encourage you to listen to some of the other podcasts such as C-POP, which is for millennials. It is usually very funny, and they talk about all kinds of things that are beyond the scope of what I deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Jolt of Joy with Carol McLeod of Buffalo, New York, is also very popular.
You also need to listen to Dr. Greene’s podcast on leadership, Greenelines. I am personally inspired every time I listen and I get that feedback wherever I travel in the country.
The Charisma News Podcast is one daily news story well told from Charisma News that is interesting listening and helps keep you up to date with what’s going on the in world. The inspiration for it was some of the things they do on NPR, where they have fine-tuned the art of communicating on the radio and now on podcasts.
A couple of my guests have been unfamiliar with podcasts, and I tell them it is like a radio program, except it is not live. It goes online and it is there basically forever, which means people can search for it, download it and listen to it months and years from now.
I was interested in what my most popular podcasts were; the fourth most popular was one I did with Jim Bakker. I recorded our conversation as we toured his impressive Morningside facility near Branson, Missouri. We must have talked for well over an hour, but there was a particular moment in which he got very reflective. I thought to myself, this is something I need to share. We turned it into a podcast and it was the fourth-most downloaded podcast I did last year.
The third most-downloaded was part of an interview I did with Ted Cruz in December. We had recorded simply so we could transcribe it and use it, but I broke it into four separate podcasts and one of them proved to be particularly popular.
My second most popular podcast was the only one of the four that I actually did in the podcast studio. It was with author Jonathan Cahn, who visited our offices and we talked about his book The Mystery of Shemitah and the phenomenon of The Mystery of the Shemitah. As you know, Jonathan is enormously popular, a brilliant thinker and theologian, and he’s always a good interview whether on a podcast, radio program or on television.
However, one podcast exceeded all the others by a factor of 10. It’s the one where I spoke with Lance Wallnau, and he told me that he believed that Donald Trump was like Cyrus. I literally told him that I wanted to get this on podcast. We arranged it, and 15 minutes later, we recorded it. It was blasted all over social media, and I was stunned by the reaction.
I hope you take time to listen to these podcasts. Please share your excitement with your circle of influence so that our podcasts continue to grow. Join with me in congratulating Dr. Greene as well as our Charisma Podcast Network Producer Atalie Anderson; Dave Block of Block Business Solutions, LLC, and Nathan Hollyfield, our production editors from Tulsa; and Kristin Eckman, our social media director for Charisma’s Media Group. {eoa}
Stephen Strang 
